Before we get to biology (aka the dying and the sex) we first have to address the characteristics that are common to all forms of science. That’s what this chapter is all about: what makes science different from all the other subjects out there.
Even the densest student has at least heard about the scientific method and the metric system. Now, they can’t tell you anything about either of them (some struggle to even tell you what the hell a meter measures--spoiler, it’s distance) but they at least know the words. And that’s a problem with a lot of people, they know the words but they have no clue what the fuck they mean. Take the word theory--if you really want to piss me off, tell me something in science is “just a theory.” When it happens in class, it makes me want to take my stapler and throw it at the person’s head. The word theory has been absolutely ruined by the general public, who think it’s just a guess. IT’S NOT A FUCKING GUESS. It’s as true as something can be. Gravity is a fucking theory. Go fall down a flight of stairs if it’s “just a theory” and let me know how you turn out.
So that’s something people don’t get: science is it’s own language and if you don’t know the language, it makes it difficult to understand. But on the flip side, that “language” is just something we apply to things we inherently do. Fundamentally, science doesn’t give a shit what we call it. We can say something is a theory, a fact, a guess, a marshmallow, a wonderflugg (I just made that up and I love it), or anything else and that doesn’t change what it actually is: a collection of protons, neutrons, and electrons (we’ll get to those in chapter two). So just keep that in mind as we go through everything. Science is innate, the words we use to describe them are just things (probably) old white men made up to make things simple for us to remember.
So if science is innate (which means natural if you lack a decent vocabulary and had no clue), what the hell is it and what does it do? Well, simply put, science aims to do a few things. First and foremost science is solely concerned with the natural world. Sorry all you ghost hunters and people with yetishes (yeti fetishes), those things aren’t real and that’s not science. Hundreds of years from now they might be considered science (it’s unlikely) but you never know. You’ve got to think about it, there was a point in time that there were only four elements: earth, wind, fire, and water (sorry, Captain Planet lied to you and heart isn’t one of them). We now know that is a bunch of crap and we have 118 elements. People once believed you became sick because you had bad blood, too much phlegm, or because you pissed someone off and they got the devil to do weird things to you but that all changed roughly two hundred years ago when the germ theory of disease was developed. So I like to think of it like this: everything we know in science can be followed by the phrase “as far as we know right now.” As new tools or instruments develop, science can change. And science will change. And that’s what make it so exciting.
One of the reason that science can and will definitely change is that science is based entirely on evidence. Science doesn’t give a shit what you or anyone else thinks. You don’t believe in something? Great, science doesn’t care. You think Pluto should be a planet and not a dwarf planet? Who gives a shit? Pluto is a chunk of frozen rock flying around a giant ball of burning plasma and nothing more. So as more evidence comes in, science will have to change. You can’t ignore something just because it contradicts whatever you’ve already discovered or because it goes against what you expected to find. If you do ignore it, you’re a horrible scientist and probably a horrible person. As more and more evidence is collect, it strengthens an idea until that idea becomes ALMOST unarguably true. Science doesn’t like absolutes: so it tries to avoid words like “always” or “never” because there is almost always (see what I did there) an exception to everything. So it comes to a point where every piece of evidence says something and that something will probably will never change and when we reach that point, a theory is born.
That brings us to the last major thing that science can do: make predictions. But not just any predictions, like actual predictions that are based on the facts and evidence we just talked about and not on random-ass guessing. Because I can predict that this book is going to become a bestseller, become the first in a long line of “____ for Bastards” books, make me a shit-ton of money and allow me to disappear forever, but odds are, thats not going to happen. Science, on the other hand, actually has reasoning behind the predictions. Like if I stick a fork in an electrical outlet, I’m probably going to get the shit shocked out of me. That’s based on ALL the evidence of all the other geniuses who saw a fork, saw an electrical outlet, and thought that little face in the wall wanted a mouthful of metal. Or if the average global temperature keeps increasing, sea levels are going to rise and everyone who lives around the coast will have to become mermaids and mermen (which don’t exist).
THose three fundamental properties can be rolled into one basic sentence that explains nearly every branch of science that exists: using data based on evidence, science attempts to explain and predict events in the natural world. Thats it. Nothing more. Deal with it.
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